Shene Othman Hassan submitted her thesis on Syntactic and semantic aspects of supplementary relative clauses in English and Sorānī Kurdish and defended it December 18. Congratulations!

Shene looks at two understudied types of supplementary (i.e. non-restrictive) relative clause in English: those introduced by determiner-which, see (1), and those introduced by that, as in (2).

(1) Maybe people will attack me, in which case I will attack back. (COCA)

(2) The Patas monkey, that spends almost all of its time in open grassland,
adopts just such tactics. (Huddleston & Pullum, 2002: 1052) Continue reading Hassan’s thesis on supplementary relative clauses →

The 13th volume of Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics contains Manfred Sailer’s paper on Attributive “wrong” in underspecified semantics. The paper is based on Manfred’s talk at CSSP 2019. Manfred argues that there are two non-local readings of attributive wrong, illustrated in (1) and (2).

(1) The police arrested the wrong person.  
‘The person that the police arrested is not (among) the person(s) that the police should have arrested.’

(2) Bluebeard’s wife opened the wrong door.
‘The door that Bluebeard’s wife should not open is among the doors that Bluebeard’s wife opened.’ Continue reading Sailer on attributive “wrong” →

Monica-Mihaela Rizea’s and Manfred’s research on negative polarity items (NPI) has just appeared in a special issue of Linguisticae Investigationes on Interfaces in Romance: A constraint-based approach (edited by Gabriela Bîlbîie):

Rizea, Monica-Mihaela & Manfred Sailer. 2020. A constraint-based modeling of negative polarity items in result clause constructions in Romanian. Linguisticae Investigationes 43(1). 129–168. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/li.00042.riz

Continue reading Rizea & Sailer: NPIs in Romanian Result Clause Constructions →

The proceedings of the International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar 2019, Bucharest, are online! They contain two papers that are co-authored by members of the Frankfurt English Linguistics group: Continue reading HPSG 2019 proceedings online →

In early April the international and German press and other media reported on the publication of the first software-generated scientific book, a volume which summarizes state of the art research on lithium-ion batteries and appeared with Springer Nature. One of the creators of Beta Writer, the software behind the book, is Niko Schenk, who works and teaches linguistics at IEAS and is simultaneously  affiliated with the Applied Computational Linguistics Lab in the computer science department. We linguists at IEAS are all very excited about his work and its impact!

If you are interested in the technology and in the challenges posed by the automatic generation of research books, the introduction to the freely available electronic version of the book gives an overview on the ongoing research in this area.

Gert Webelhuth, Sascha Barmann, & Christopher Götze have just published a paper on “Idioms as evidence for the proper analysis of relative clauses” in a volume on Reconstruction effects in relative clauses.

The authors provide evidence against a raising analysis of relative clauses and show that the data on idioms in relative clauses can be captured elegantly in a modification analysis. Among many other highlights, the paper presents the first formal account of anaphoric relations to idiom parts across sentence boundaries.

Continue reading Webelhuth et al in “Reconstruction effects in relative clauses” →